Recently considered for multimedia systems is MPEG Media Transport (MMT) technology for the purpose of providing multimedia services to users by transmitting multimedia data containing various types of data files, such as video, audio, application, webpage, or metadata, over a composite network that includes a broadcast network, a communication network, or other networks and simultaneously connect the broadcast network and the communication network.
Such multimedia data correspond to components of a multimedia service that is delivered to a user, and are delivered to the user by splitting into several data units or merging together according to the characteristics of the components of the multimedia service. For example, considering the characteristics of the transmitting scheme according to the type of the data and the characteristics of the network to transmit the data, a transmit end may configure multimedia data into data packets and transmit the data packets. The data packets transmitted from the transmit end are received and configured by a receive end back into the multimedia data that is then served to the user.
The data units which constitute multimedia data may be transmitted to the receive end, with each data unit split into multiple fragments depending on the properties of the network over which the data is transmitted from the transmit end. In a general multimedia system, where one data unit splits into multiple fragments and each data packet is constituted of such fragment, the transmit end may indicate the positions of a fragment included in the data packet, like the first fragment, mid fragment, and last fragment of the data unit, and the transmit end transmits the position information and the respective numbers of the data packets, as fragmentation information about the data unit, to the receive end. The receive end may identify whether all of the data packets including fragments constituting the data unit have been received by looking into the fragmentation information.
However, the conventional art constitutes one data unit with multiple data packets and sends out the data unit without considering the size of the data unit and the size of each of the fragments of the data unit, thus failing to precisely configure the fragmentation information about the data unit. Thus, a need exists for a scheme for more precisely configuring fragmentation information about each data unit of multimedia data.